The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji

This third print is Katsushika Hokusai’s The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji from his series “One Hundred Ghost Stories.” This print is based is also based on a book by Santō Kyōden, the 1803 book Asaka Swamp: A Strange Tale of Revenge (Fukushū kidan Asaka no numa), which itself was based on an actual suicide-turned kaidan. The real-life events involved an eighteenth-century kabuki actor who committed suicide due to his lack of success, after which his wife and her lover dumped his body to conceal his death. Fictional retellings make the story much more dramatic, telling of Kohada Koheiji as an unsuccessful kabuki actor, only able to take roles as ghosts and monsters onstage. He is murdered by his wife and her lover, who drown him in Asaka swamp, only for him to return as a ghost seeking revenge. It is this scene which Hokusai depicts, with Koheji’s ghost pulling down on mosquito netting to peer down on his treacherous wife and her lover.

Unlike the previous two prints, this depiction is not entirely skeletal–while the fingers and most of the skull are completely bone, we can also see details such as the eyes, some hair and therefore scalp on the back of the skull, and muscle tissue throughout the jaw and neck portions of the figure.